In Cirque du Soleil’s first Broadway show, “Paramour,” it’s not just the acrobats who take flight. It’s the lampshades.
In a romantic moment when two characters declare their feelings for each other, their love gets a visual expression when an octet of circular lampshades rise into the air and execute airborne choreography. Turns out they’re not lampshades at all — they’re drones.
It’s tech more closely associated with warfare and paparazzi, and the use of it onstage marks a first both for Broadway and for Cirque. It also stands as one small manifestation of Cirque’s broader mission statement on Broadway: combining the bones of traditional musical theater with the nouveau-circus stagecraft for which the brand is known. That means high-flying acrobatics, a distinctive musical vocabulary and the kind of envelope-pushing scenery, makeup and technical elements that audiences haven’t seen before — like those flying machines.
“We are thrilled to provide this artistic contribution to the show and bring our machines to life on Broadway,” said Raffaello D’Andrea, founder of Verity Studios and creator of the flying machine choreography. “Creating flying machines that are reliable enough, and that have the performance ability to operate day after day in such a challenging live theatre environment is the fruition of more than a decade of research and development.” Verity Studios’ flying machines will perform eight times a week – without nets – in front of an audience of up to two thousand people.
“This kind of thing is almost expected when you buy a ticket to a Cirque du Soleil show,” said Scott Zeiger, president and managing director of Cirque du Soleil Theatrical. “For the three minutes they’re watching those lampshades, the audience is witnessing a $500,000 moment. They may love it or they may hate it, but they can’t see it anywhere else on Broadway.”
The overall production costs of “Paramour,” a love triangle set in Hollywood’s golden age, rings in at $25 million, which is expensive for Broadway but cheap for Cirque. That half-million lampshade moment aims to translate an intimate character beat into an unexpected visual motif, magical enough to fill the Lyric, a 1,900-seat venue that Broadway types often describe as “cavernous.”
The sequence grew out of an earlier, experimental collaboration between Cirque and Verity Studios. In 2014 the two groups collaborated (along with ETH Zurich) to produce SPARKED, a short film featuring ten quadrocopters in a flying dance performance with a human actor. SPARKED was named a Winner of the 2016 New York City Drone Film Festival.
As in the “Paramour” number, the sequence is performed by autonomous flying machines that, according to Verity’s Raffaello D’Andrea, follow pre-programmed choreography but make their own decisions based on their relation to each other and where they are in space.
The technical challenge of incorporating robots into live performance has meant that, until now, most theatre robots have been remotely controlled – essentially puppets, with humans working behind stage to operate them. But to manually control the flight paths of a troupe of quadrocopters in a tightly choreographed sequence that also involves human performers would be technically impossible. “It would be impossible for human beings to pilot these machines to do what you’re seeing, in terms of unison, timing, and choreography,” he said.
Verity Studios’ flying machines use distributed intelligence and sophisticated algorithms to achieve the kind of robust performance and safety standards required for live public performance. “From the flying machines’ own built-in intelligence to interference-proof communications, our systems are designed around safety, reliability, and robustness,” said Markus Hehn, technical lead at Verity Studios. “The only remote commands the flying machines receive are high level ones, such as take off or land.”
There were plenty of challenges in getting those machines to the stage. For one thing, there was tech to be adapted for flying indoors without the aid of GPS, and lighting design had to be modulated so that their flight would read for audiences members all the way at the back of the house. Then there was the fire department to contend with. “It’s pretty rare that you have to have the fire marshal come to approve a number in your show that doesn’t involve fire,” Zeiger said. The marshal, in fact, nixed the original plan of having one or more of the machines fly out over the audience.
But with the all those hurdles overcome, the drones now perform eight times a week in a number that aims to imbue the mundane with a little wonder. “A lampshade is an everyday object,” D’Andrea said. “To see them fly, it’s like magic.” (The engineer-artist added that similar tech could be used onstage any time creatives want to move something in an arbitrary way in 3D space.)
And this is not the first time robots have appeared on Broadway: Karel Capek’s science fiction play R.U.R. (infamous for introducing the term ‘robot’ to the English language) ran for 184 performances at the Garrick Theatre in 1922.
{ SOURCE: Broadway World, Variety | http://goo.gl/cdxBjB, http://goo.gl/NOnb7U }
